complexity

Sean B. Carroll is coming out with a new book called The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters. This is the molecular biologist Sean Carroll, as distinct from the physicist (who wrote this). Homeostasis is one of the basic principles of biology. The term can be applied broadly to mean that certain numbers are maintained within a certain range. This could refer to energy flowing through a system, numbers of specific cellular products like enzymes, numbers of individual organisms in an ecological system, etc. It is not so much that numbers don't change.…

Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, who is at both the Weizmann Institute and MIT, will receive the 2012 A.M. Turing Award, together with Prof. Silvio Micali of MIT. Goldwasser is only the third woman to receive the Award since its inception in 1966, and she is the third faculty member of the Weizmann Institute to receive what is considered to be the “Nobel Prize in computing.” Goldwasser and Micali’s work in the 1980s laid the foundations of modern cryptography – the science that, among other things, keeps your electronic transactions secure. The basis of their work is a series of riffs on the…

I've had a number of emails recently, as I've written here, at The Chatelaine's Keys (Yes, I know the site is down - there was a billing mixup that required a fax to fix - we don't have one at home and we got a foot and a half of snow on Friday, too much to bother struggling out for. The blog will be back soon, now that Eric is at work where faxes are more prevalent than out here on the farm.) and on facebook about the process of preparing to foster and eventually hopefully adopt more children that asked what this had to do with peak energy and climate change. I'm a little reluctant to…

As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about feeding cities that includes a nice, rational (look at the comments for more good stuff) discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I'm glad to see the issue come up, because it has so much power. I'm grateful to Liz for providing such a balanced and rational discussion, since most of them aren't. I don't think I'm even overstating when I say that every time I go somewhere and talk about food, someone asks me what I think of the idea of Vertical Farming. It is the cool, trendy idea about feeding cities that gets tons…

There's some good stuff in yesterday's post asking what physics you'd like to read more about. I'm nursing a sore neck and shoulder, so I'll only do one or two quick ones today, starting with James D. Miller in the first comment: 1) Is it true that our understanding of quantum physics comes from studying systems with only a small number of particles and there is a good chance our theories won't hold in more complex systems. It all depends on how you define your terms-- what counts as a "small number" of particles, and what counts as not holding? It's certainly true that most of the…

One of Buckminster Fuller's most interesting conceits was his dislike of specialization, which he likened to a kind of intellectual prison, restraining "bright" people from truly understanding the complex, and general, systems of which they were a part. After all, he argued, what causes extinction in the animal kingdom? Overspecialization. Of course, it's logical, and it's s problem we see over and over again in human history, from the Industrial Revolution displacing specialized factory workers to the often daunting gap of comprehension between the social and "hard" sciences. As soon as we…

Here is one final thanks to all of my readers, especially for all of your wonderful comments over the last week. I know I'll miss blogging here. In fact, I doubt I'll be able to stay gone for too long. I promise, (barring any truly chaotic circumstances) that I will return. I may start a new blog then, since I was ready to change themes anyways. I'll find a way to let you know when I return to blogging, even if it isn't under the same "Chaotic Utopia" banner. In the meantime, you can find me in any of the following places: Facebook (though I warn you, I'm just barely starting it--it'll be a…

So, here I am, with a huge backlog of things to post--science news and lab reports, fractal art, tips for green living--you know, the usual stuff. And, so, with all that ready to go, what do I do when I get my computer functioning? I write something else. I guess that’s not too unusual. Poetic inspiration comes when it does--the wise writer shouldn’t argue with it. Yet, it wasn’t the fluidity and ease of writing that surprised me--it was the topic. "I don’t write stories about the war," I said on Monday. Five days later, I’m going over the third draft of a story about war. It’s a subject I…

What if you could escape this busy world, rise above the clouds, and see everything from a new perspective? From that astronauts-eye-view, you could see the greenhouse effect in action: Sunlight pouring in, some reflected off of clouds in the upper layers of the atmosphere, some filtering down below. The light that does manage to reach the earth is absorbed or reflected by the surface below. That reflected earth shine bounces off the clouds as well, in colors imperceptible to you or I. Would it be an alien sight? Colors we can’t see, our homes obstructed by that foggy greenhouse roof, with…

Well, I’ve probably set a new record for myself--2 weeks without a post. As you might imagine, I’ve been a little busy lately. For some reason, midterms really snuck up on me and hit me hard this spring... suffering a head cold and an internet outage in the middle of it didn’t help much. Throw in the fact that I’m in the middle of redecorating my living room, and you’ll see that I’ve barely had time to sleep, let alone blog. Not that I’ve had much exciting news to blog about--the highlight of my last week was sorting through my massive book collection, trying to pare it down to the point…

Leap through Labor to Leap through Labor to Leap I created a bit of ambiguous poetry recently, and I simply couldn’t resist trying another. And well, it is Leap Day, after all... which is also my birthday, so it seems like a good time for a "free choice" fractal. That said, I couldn’t bring myself to simply post the art and line. I’d fidget all weekend wondering if anyone understood it. Even if I do explain, it still may not make any sense. When I initially started to create this fractal (from a formula ambiguously named Andrextrandom) I called it "Flight", for several reasons. Most…

"A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the truth with laughter. For once she blazes her trail in the symbolic, she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the personal--in her pronouns, her nous, and her clique of referents.... On the one hand she has…

Speaking of unpredictable climate changes, there was always that surprising storm on Jupiter that started brewing last year (and still blows strongly.) I figured now would be as good a time as any to repost the fractal I made in tribute. (This works out especially well, as I didn’t have anything else prepared.) Pictures released to the media [May 5, 2006] seemed absolutely perfect for the Friday Fractal. A breathtaking example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, today’s image shows the enigmatic beauty of chaotic patterns. No scientist has yet been able to explain the famous deep…

All these sets of knowledge were laid out before me, like packages tied in brightly colored papers and curling ribbons, each as enticing as the last. These weren’t just ideas, like the pictures on the pages of catalogs, but complete structures; laws and theories and all the understandings that led to their constructions. Bright packages of knowledge, each a puzzle unto itself--how was I to choose among them? To open them all would be certain madness--yet how could I resist? Oh, to be no longer limited to catalog poses, to grasp the real thing. If I opened them all at once, would I be…

Last week, I discussed the difficulty of creating a perfect model of our environment. Once, I toyed around with the idea of a perfect simulation... wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from reality? What if we created the perfect model--and it turned out to actually be reality? As advanced as our technology is, we obviously won’t have to worry about this any time soon. But in a science fiction story, where plausibility is a little plastic, we can explore such questions. So, that’s what I did last year--I wrote a story. And here it is: Ω By Karmen Lee Franklin The General swept his fingers…

After questioning how easily we might create useful models of our environment the other day, I started to wonder if I could even mimic our planet with a fractal. I’ve played around with spherical fractals in the past, for instance, my Paper Ball and my Harvest Moon. As with most of my fractals, I could only come so close. These patterns, as with most fractals, are based on a "seed" number; a number chosen at random. So, after choosing an earth-like palette and setting up the basics, I started trying different seeds. Some produced worlds covered in oceans, others bare and rocky. Sometimes they…

How do we study our environment? Is it too complex a thing to quantitatively describe, and thus too complex to exhibit predictable behavior? I’ve been performing a thought experiment over the past few days, tossing around such questions. I’m not sure I can really adequately describe these thoughts with words or images. Still, I’m going to try. Individual scientific experiments tend to be specific. We look at a certain property and try to explain it with a hypothesis, then test that hypothesis repeatedly under various conditions to show if it is valid or not. If it isn’t, we head back to…

I suppose, if I wanted to make things easier, I would just start calling these the "Weekend Fractal" but it just doesn’t have the same ring. Besides, this week, Carl Zimmer beat me to the Friday Fractal, on naked skin even. (The owner of the fleshy fractal shares some interesting insights on his Julia set; be sure to check it out.) Still, I had this section of a Mandelbrot set lying around, whose autumn hues would be ill fit if posted later in the season: You can see where this slice fits in to the entire set in this short movie: &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Here, if…

Note from your fractalist: Sorry, folks, this one is a day late. I discovered early yesterday that my old website had been hacked. It has been fixed, now, although I plan to eventually remove everything from there, and repost it here somewhere. Just getting the bad scripts out has kept me plenty busy. Never fear, I did finish the Friday Fractal. Other (current) posts are forthcoming. -K I’m not the only one around here who gets into fractals. I’ve noticed a few other science bloggers occasionally blog on the topic. Mark, over at Good Math, Bad Math, has been working on a series describing the…

A few posts back, I indicated that I was finished with travelling, and ready to settle into my classes at CU Boulder. Naturally, chaos has a way of affecting plans made with certainty. Sure enough, as soon as I returned from New York, I found myself packing my suitcase once again, this time to head to Wyoming and South Dakota for my grandpa’s funeral. The timing wasn’t wonderful; I had to miss a day of class, and ended up spending part of my "vacation time" studying. That’s where the chaotic parts played in. Of course, the subjects that I’m studying are intrinsically relevant to me,…